About

Welcome to the Lab Page of Rumi Chunara, Assistant Professor at New York University.

The overarching goal of our research is to develop the principles needed to incorporate unstructured, Internet and mobile data into a better understanding of population-level health. We primarily develop computational methods across data mining, natural language processing, and machine learning to generate features for spatio-temporal population-level public health models.

*New paper on arxiv: Domain Adaptation for Infection Prediction from Symptoms Based on Data from Different Study Designs and Contexts 06/2018

*First assessment of what people Tweet about in comparison to actual illness: What Do People Tweet When They’re Sick? A Preliminary Comparison of Symptom Reports and Twitter Timelines, to be presented at ICWSM Workshop on Social Media and Health 06/2018

*Feasibility of a Social Network Based Vascular Risk Reduction Program for Mild Stroke Survivors accepted for presentation at the World Stroke Congress 05/2018

*New paper on Socio-spatial Self-organizing Maps: Using Social Media to Assess Relevant Geographies for Exposure to Social Processes on arxiv 3/2018.

*“From the User to the Medium: Neural Profiling Across Web Communities” accepted as poster paper at ICWSM 3/2018.

*Our group selected as one of the Phase-I winners of the Healthy Behavior Data Challenge, a partnership between the Government of Canada, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and MaRS Discovery District 11/2017

*New paper on Using Sparse Digital Traces to Fill in Individual Level Mobility Timelines available on arxiv 10/2017.

*Bisakha Ray’s work on “Predicting Acute Respiratory Infections from Participatory Data” accepted for an Oral Presentation at the 2016 International Society for Disease Surveillance conference 12/2016. Second Prize Award for Outstanding Student Abstract.

*Nabeel Rehman will present his work on Using Propensity Score Matching to Understand the Relationship Between Online Health Information Sources and Vaccination Sentiment at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford University in March 2016.

*Prof. Chunara was an invited speaker at a panel on Web-Based Public Health Informatics at IEEE BHI ’16 in February 2016.

*Bisakha Ray presented her work on Integrating Genomic Data in a Community-based Multi-modal Viral Transmission Model for Network Inference at the NIPS Workshop on ML for Healthcare in Montreal, December 2015.